


The First Dream

by Capriciously_Terminal



Category: Beauty and the Beast (2017), Beauty and the Beast - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Like seriously dude you'd think he'd have nightmares from all the stuff he goes through, Nightmares, No relationships as of yet we gotta talk about how screwed up Beastie is first, so he does
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-17
Updated: 2017-05-17
Packaged: 2018-11-01 17:49:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10926921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capriciously_Terminal/pseuds/Capriciously_Terminal
Summary: He’s not sure when simply closing his eyes ended and sleep began, but he suddenly finds himself somewhere painfully familiar. Somewhere he never thought he’d see again.Maurice's arrival in the castle stirs memories of a night never forgotten. The first dream, wherein a beast must start to remember everything if he is to ever be free.(Basically I loved the opening ball scene of the 2017 remake enough to write it into a dream sequence and a bit of an introspection into a certain transformation).





	The First Dream

The first night the thief is in his castle, barricaded in the frosty iron of his cells, the air seems different. Sharper, clearer even. It burns his eyes and twitches at his nose in a way frost never can. Perhaps it’s just the knowledge that there’s someone new in the castle, someone _human_. Perhaps it’s the residual rage still brimming in his core, or the recollection of the fear in the thief’s eyes when he’d been on his back in the rose garden, but there’s something making The Beast look over his shoulder.

He prowls and paces over the filthy marble of the west wing as his fur bristles. He feels as though something’s wrong, something on a wavelength he wouldn’t have fully understood if he’d been a man. He’d have called it a bad omen, but it’s something more. Something like the feeling of the air when a storm rolled in, or the calm before his father would bellow as the air turned icy and sour. He’s more irritable than ever, but chalks it up to a man _picking_ one of his _roses_ of all things, or how his servants had attempted to plead on the thief’s behalf, or how the rose looked so slim and lacked so many petals.

He can’t seem to settle down, something popping down his spine like hot grease and making him stay on his haunches. He’ll force himself to lie down in his nest of filthy ornate bedding and drapery. He stays eerily still surrounded by dirty red velvets, the occasional jaw bone from a deer he’s dragged back to his rooms, and fine goose feathers from pillows he’s torn to shreds only briefly. He keeps turning in circles on all fours (he rarely walks this way, only when something’s truly wrong and beast-like sense is all he can rely on) but sleep doesn’t come.

He has to get up, stalk to the window, look down on the frozen land below him, hear the howl of the wind, imagine the chill of his cells where he can hear the old thief hacking away, huff angrily, pace to the rose, place a claw on the glass covering it, stare at the pile of withered petals littering the stone table beneath it, and finally allow the guilt of it all to send him back to his nest.

He’s still just as angry though and winds up repeating the whole process too many times to count. He eventually calms down enough after pacing scratches into the floor, to fall into a tense unconsciousness. He’s not sure when simply closing his eyes ended and sleep began, but he suddenly finds himself somewhere painfully familiar. Somewhere he never thought he’d see again.

_Everything is so strange._ He cannot comprehend it all. Surely he is just drunk on the atmosphere, the buzz in the air seeming to flood into his mind. The light is so bright it burns his eyes. A ballroom that seems to be filled with stars and hundreds of faces is easy enough to get lost in with light reflecting off every surface. Surely the glimmer of this world filled with fluttering white silk and hundreds of painted eyes is too intoxicating. None of it feels real, the splendor and the quickening of the aria sweeping him away like the tide. It all crashes down in a crescendo. He stands as a man, a form so familiar and yet so strange now. Each woman in the crowd seems to have the same face as he dances, as he takes each delicate hand for the briefest of moments and searches each pair of indistinguishable eyes for something to pull him close.

The music is swelling and his feet must not be on the floor. He must be gliding, flying because the world moves _so fast_. He is giddy with power, his father’s shadow and his mother’s ghost so far away from all of this light and luxury. He’s going to burst soon from the sheer intensity of it all, the sights and sounds and colors crafting a strange haze after so long in the darkness. Just as he’s returning to the comfort of it, the sense that this is how everything must be and always has been, it all goes wrong. Surely this isn’t how things go. Surely a woman does not burst through a pair of doors shrouded in a dark cloak. Surely his dream is a nightmare as the candles all go out. The ballroom that was once warmed by bodies and laughter is plagued with a cold enough chill that the air cuts through his fine silks and shudders on his skin.

She must not hold a rose as red as blood, as raw as a heart, as perfect as if it had been hand crafted by an artisan. Petals curl immaculately around each other, soft leaves fan from a stem as green as any field in summer. But the stem is encased in the woman’s gnarled twig-like fingers, and the enchanting effect is lost. She gazes up at him with massive watery eyes that seem hidden in a face wracked with age and scars. She is the most ghastly thing he’s ever seen. He, so young and vibrant and confident, recognizes somewhere deep in his mind that this is a fate he fears. He could fade into this hideousness and he is _repulsed_. She offers him the rose, her voice like the wind’s hollow moan, and begs for shelter from the winter’s chill. He feels the stares of his guests on his back, and he is suffocating in the air. He is locked between their eyes and this woman’s wretched visage. He laughs to shatter the glass-like tension he is trapped behind. He is _cruel_ because that is what a man in his position does.

The entire thing is ridiculous anyway, this dream-like sense of nonsense, because ugly old women don’t crash balls with perfect roses clenched in their fists. The winter chill does not leak into a room this thoroughly from a single opening of the castle doors. His story does not turn into this. He was to be dancing the night away and choosing a bride, not dealing with this out of place hag. His face is powdered and pale with his shocking eyes colored like the plumage of some jungle bird. His perfect lips cruelly turn up to reveal straight white teeth that gleam despite the darkness as he laughs. He is sweltering in his wig and his coat, despite the chill that still permeates the room. He takes the rose in his hand, head full of petals sitting on his palm as the stem dangles between his fingers, and looks at it the same way one would gaze down upon a particularly pathetic token of affection.

She offers again, her mouth a horrible gash in her face. Her eyes dark and muddy. Grey hair streaked like dirty wool peaking from her threadbare cloak. This is not a woman who belongs in his palace. A part of him, smaller and younger, thinks of empty servants quarters and how Mrs. Potts could escort this woman there faster than blinking, but it is drowned out. He sends her away. The monster inside begs for him to do anything different, to accept her rose or beg her forgiveness, but there is no changing what’s been done.

_She_ changes so quickly though, with a feeling like lightning striking the earth. She sheds the cloak and her face fades away. For a moment looking at her is like staring into the sun, and he is starting to realize that he has made a mistake. She is young, smooth skinned with fair hair and a fine nose. She is beautiful, different from any of the young women he’s just danced with. But she quickly stops being just a young woman. She is fire on glass. She is too much too soon. She is his dream-like haze made real as she rises from the floor and shines. She is ageless now. She is power. He has made a _mistake_.

He looks into her eyes and they seem as deep and wide as a chasm. She is not just looking at him. She is looking in him, her eyes reaching and reaching until she finds the deepest part of him and takes hold of it. She is cool and sharp and his guests are running, fleeing, as he is held by her gaze. Briefly he thinks she reminds him, in some facet of her divinity, of his mother framed by sunlight. He sinks to his knees. She is shedding power in golden waves and he hears her voice in his head as it echoes through his ballroom.

**_You are no man._ **

And so he is not. He feels her hold on what must surely be his soul twist. _No, no, not again he’s sorry, he’s so sorry. PLEASE._

It’s so sudden, he _is_ and then _is not_. It’s a new kind of pain, not entirely physical but something so wrong it reverberates in his head and shatters everything he was. Everyone is running. Golden dust is shining in the air and catching in his eyes and throat as he screams because he knows his body. He knows its feel and security, and that is gone. He is too much. He is so different and the world is shattering because he was _screaming_. He was screaming but now he is _roaring_ , something primal and ancient and animalistic shaking through him as all of the grandeur shatters into dust and decay. His hands are clawed and covered in coarse brown hair, horns poke from his head, and he can no longer stand like a man. He is a beast again. The rose this woman holds is shedding petals so quickly. He’s running out of time, but what’s the point? Who would love him like this? When he’s so hideous inside and out and all he knows is the pain of his own teeth, fangs now, sinking into his lower lip as the world is fading. As he falls. _He is a monster_ , and the rose has lost all petals, and he is doomed _forever more_. _A beast until the end of time alone amidst a sea of furniture that used to speak._ He has ruined everything, just as his father said he would, and now he’s trapped here in his decrepit castle to die like the animal that he is. He should fall into unconsciousness, fall into some kind of fit for days. He should drop to the floor and spare himself the sight of his servants being transformed into _things_.

But the dream doesn’t end, yet it does not continue. The woman, the enchantress, is still standing there. His ballroom is once again destroyed, everything covered and desolate, but the world doesn’t move. It’s as though she’s frozen time itself.

“Don’t you remember?” When she speaks she has so many voices. His mother on her deathbed, the rasp of an old woman, she even sounds like Mrs. Potts when she’d scold him for skipping a lesson or hiding from dinner. His father’s icy rage is hidden in as well, mixing with a voice he’s only just heard. She sounds like the thief in his tower “Don’t you remember that night?”

He is still on the ground, on his knees, his hands covering his face. “Why do you continue to torment me? What good can this _do_?”

She does not move to comfort him like his mother would. Her eyes don’t soften like Mrs Potts’s would. She does not move to strike him like his father. She remains impassively in front of him, the golden hem of her dress shining amidst the darkness. She does not speak initially, only looks down on him like the wretch he is. The rose in her fist has one remaining petal clinging doggedly to its stem. Finally, as if ages have passed, she speaks. “You should not forget. If you are ever to be free, you must not forget any of it.” She kneels, he looks up, and her deep eyes are all he can see. “I doubt it will do any good to remind you, I doubt you have learned anything, but…” Her eyes seem to shine in the darkness. “Perhaps you will surprise me.” It’s as though her eyes contain the cosmos. She laughs, cruel and sharp, and the world fades away.

Before he wakes he believes he hears the thunder of hooves, the soft melody of a music box, and the clicking churn of a windmill.

He wakes with a start as the sun is just starting to peek over the treetops. The sky is grey, as it has been every day in his perpetual winter. Puffed clouds are just starting to move with the wind as snow falls shakily. He sits up, the enchantress’s laugh echoing in his core, and the chill of the morning air settles on his shoulders like a robe. The restlessness from the night before has changed, an unease taking permanent shelter in his stomach. This dream, if anything, is the first drop of rain from the storm or he sound of his father’s boots down the hall. Whatever he felt last night has not finished yet, and the knowledge is heavy on his heart as he removes himself from his even more disheveled bed nest. The glass dome over the rose glints in the faint morning light, the petals that have not fallen still shine with the same vibrant red from the first time he saw it even in the current light. The fallen husks littering the table’s face however, are a mottled bruise-like purple.

He places his hand on the glass, a slight _tink_ sounding as his claws strike the fragile surface, and lets out a sigh. Something is changing, he senses it as a part of the air now, but he cannot tell if it’s for the better or not. The portrait on the wall of a young man with glimmering eyes and straight teeth seems to pierce him with its eyes despite how badly he has attempted to tear it to shreds. The eyes of a prince accuse him and seem to sink the chill even deeper into his shoulders. Something is coming. Something is coming like the bite of the wind or the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and it stretches from the horizon towards him.

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been working on this for a good while and now it's done. Gosh dang it remake you may have problems but you inspire me to write so much. There may be more of these? I'm always down for a good old 'stylized dream sequence of something we didn't see too much of a character perspective in the movie' because ol' Beastie probably has so much angst in his memories. And who knows maybe even Belle can show up? IDK I never thought I'd publish this but I just keep coming back to it and I like how it sounds.
> 
> Thoughts? Is this even worth pursuing?


End file.
